Victor Hugo Quotes

Titles of honor are like the impressions on coins, which add no value to gold or silver, but only render brass current.

How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!.

All the worth of some people lies in their name; upon a closer inspection it dwindles to nothing, but from a distance it deceives us.

It's all about impressing people.

The true value of somebody in this town is very hard to determine. It's all smoke and mirrors.

A man's real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love.

Reputation is favorable notoriety as distinguished from fame, which is permanent approval of great deeds and noble thoughts by the best intelligence of mankind.

What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.

It is also, I would guess, a universal that in all societies people value respectability granted to them.

The trappings of lifestyle are often that; traps.

My vanity was flattered by having been mistaken for our revered sovereign. I ordered a banquet to be got ready for the following evening, under the trees before my house, and invited the whole town.

We judge of entire nations by the productions of a few mechanical arts, and think we are talking of men, while we are boasting of their estates, their dress, and their palaces. The sense in which we apply the terms, great, and noble, high rank, and high life, show, that we have, on such occasions, transferred the idea of perfection from the character to the equipage; and that excellence itself is, in our esteem, a mere pageant, adorned at a great expense, by the labors of many workmen.

Obviously, having your peers' respect is everything. I learned that a long time ago: that some people see you one way, some people see you another way, but having your peers' respect is what's really important.

When you're respected by your peers, that's amazing.

They please, are pleas'd, they give to get esteem Till, seeming blest, they grow to what they seem.

All that glitters is sold as gold.

A cut glass English accent can fool unsuspecting Americans into detecting a brilliance that isn't there

Honors to me now are not what they once were.

Most orgies that you go to, I have found, most of it is sad. All that wildness, all those laughs were like the shining silver and gold paper on packages, but there was nothing inside.

High honor is not only gotten and born by pain and danger, but must be nursed by the like, else it vanisheth as soon as it appears to the world.

It is easier to add to a great reputation than to get it.

Polished brass will pass upon more people than rough gold.

Sometimes glass glitters more than diamonds because it has more to prove.

This food-and-shelter theory concerning man's efforts is without insight. Our most persistent and spectacular efforts are concerned not with the preservation of what we are but with the building up of an imaginary conception of ourselves in the opinion of others. The desire for praise is more imperative than the desire for food and shelter.